At that, it succeeded.  Now, when I talk to them about what I’m doing, they no longer look at me like I have two heads.

My mom even bought two subscriptions to the print edition of Wired – one for herself, and one for my brother-in-law.  The more interesting one is for my brother-in-law.  Here’s a little timeline.

• 9/2/07 – Purchased a gift subscription for two years
• 7/21/08 – Received an email from Wired, breathlessly stating that the subscription was about to run out!
• 8/14/08 – Another email, another urgent reminder to renew!
• 9/X/08 – Renewed for a year (until 9/2010), thinking the subscription was about to expire
• 6/17/09 – Another email from Wired – your gift subscription is expiring!
• 7/15/09 – Yet another email
• 9/16/09 – Finally, a letter urging her not to “disappoint a friend who’s looking forward to staying on top of our technological future”, once again making it as hard to figure out as possible that the subscription still has a year to go before it expires.

Now, I understand that the magazine industry is struggling.  There is so much competition for our time and attention.  Honestly, when was the last time you read a magazine when you weren’t on an airplane or in a waiting room?

But you would think that the magazine that employs the guy who wrote The Long Tail would maybe have a clue.  Deceiving your customers is no way to keep them.  Wired tried to walk a fine line between aggressively pursuing subscriptions and outright lying to customers, and then crossed right over.  It’s possible that the software people who wrote their email reminder system forgot to look at the year the subscription expired, only focusing on the month.  As a software person myself, I’d be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.  But when my mom emailed Wired to complain, she got a form letter that totally ignored her question and suggested that it was her responsibility to keep track of her subscription, not theirs, and that she should just ignore their urgent emails if she had already renewed.

It’s sad – I think the magazine industry fills a good niche.  They’re more specialized than the newspapers, though not as timely.  But they’re more succinct and faster than books.  There is clearly a spot for something resembling a magazine in the future of media.  But when the pursuit of another year of subscription fees becomes more important than how you treat your customers, you’re waving a white flag.  You’re telling the world that you are unable to compete, unable to adapt to a changing world, and you’re clinging to deceptive marketing to prop up the status quo.

I feel like I repeat the same thing, over and over, but too many people don’t seem to get it.  There will always be a place in the world for talented people.  But when those talented people refuse to acknowledge that some of the ways they used to make money might not work anymore, and start demanding that the world change back to the way it was, they lose their relevancy.  You can’t try to limit technological advances to save you from having to redefine the way you do business.  You have to look at what the technology enables, and how it can help you.

You’d think a technology magazine would get that.

So, they’ve launched Mobiebook, an ebook store to go along with their reader.  This makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is the giant disclaimer on the front of the site:

All eBooks on this website are powered by Mobipocket eBooks common library and you can read them on your PC, but not on the EZ Reader. This is because the EZ reader currently does not support DRM ebooks. We are working hard on supporting the DRM format, and we will notify EZ Reader users when a firmware update is available it will be displayed on this website.

Can you imagine if you bought an iPod and followed Apple’s instructions to head over to iTunes, and then were told you were welcome to buy songs, but you couldn’t play them on your new device?  iTunes would have lasted about a week with no sales before disappearing.

When you have two complementary products (MP3s and MP3 players, ebooks and ebook readers, whatever), sales of one are supposed to drive sales of the other.  Ideally, this even works both ways.  But here, because of the ongoing ebook format wars and the inclusion of anti-consumer DRM, we have a situation where the complementary goods aren’t even complementary.

They also have a really interesting “promotion” going on, where you can pay extra for things that are usually included in the price.  Maybe I’m missing something – the website is pretty awful – but I’m not sure where the deal part of this is.